The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their thirteenth piece, they discuss Robert Wise’s sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still …

The prestige releases of awards season and the high-gloss trashiness of summer blockbuster season have one thing in common: they both cause movie fans to ride a circle of hype after any given movie is released, with many films going from…

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on June, 15, 2015.
David Bowie has never played an actual deity on film, although as Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), he does get to hang out with Jesus for…

The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their twelfth piece, they discuss Terry Zwigoff’s irreverent entry in the holiday canon, Bad…

George Lucas is a master at building worlds. The one that comes to mind is far, far away but four years before Tatooine, Lucas built a planet of a different sort. It was full of deadly moving vehicles, sweeping music, and young men…

It is a sad indicator of how mainstream studios fail to cater for female audiences that led to the creation of the term “woman’s film”, a brand of domestic melodrama that reached its cultural and commercial peak during the Second World War.…

With the recent cinematic release of the latest installment of The Hunger Games series, Mockingjay- Part 1, it seems to be the perfect time to look into some of the more predominant themes and allegorical references in this…

I have no recollection of the first film I saw in theatres. When I was two months old, my father passed over reruns of I Love Lucy in the middle of the night, only to lull me to sleep to Platoon. This might explain why heavy metal makes me…

The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their eleventh piece, they discuss Mathieu Kassovitz’s gritty yet sleek portrait of life on the…

Throughout the 1960s-early 1970s, a combination of financial desperation, creative daring, and an adventurous movie-going public had produced a creative detonation in mainstream American movies not seen before or since. Each year of the…

Editor's Note: This article was originally published May 5, 2015.
Ian Fleming's James Bond is one of the most recognizable and successful characters in modern popular culture. The novels have sold over 100 million copies, and the film…

Editor's Note: This article was originally published November 1, 2012.
Fifty years ago this month, Marilyn Monroe passed away from a suspected accidental drug overdose (although conspiracy geeks love to contemplate more nefarious…

This is Part 1 of a 4 part series leading up to the release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part II, each looking at an individual film in the series and it's legacy.
The Hunger Games series is special. It does things differently,…

Occasionally older, strong-willed women creep into the sex-saturated narrative of horror that traditionally wallows in the terrorizing and disposing of young ladies. There is something to the fact that whether their presence maintains,…

In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, Breathless, would make him an icon of French cinema, inaugurating a career that has consistently expanded society’s definitions and expectations of cinema. That film alone would have reason…

The dream came true on October 28th, 2013 at Los Angeles’s Egyptian Theater, where the 2013 Beyond Fest was being held. Trick ‘r Treat (2007) was appropriately closing out the evening, but the viewing began with a Q&A…